Effective management of network systems, including telephone systems, is necessary to optimize the system's operational capabilities and to minimize signal traffic disruptions. Management objectives include anticipating service deterioration and the quick isolation and repair of the causes of disruption and/or failure. This requires that operational performance monitoring and system fault isolation be performed in real time, during system operation, and with minimum signal traffic disruption. Fault management in particular must include the ability to isolate and repair faults quickly enough to comply with BELLCORE service quality standards.
The timely isolation and repair of faults first requires an ease of access to the system equipment and wiring by the system operator, or craftsperson. Secondly, with access, the craftsperson must have the ability to apply fault diagnostics to quickly isolate failures to the system's switching equipment or to the network wiring since network faults require the assistance of the network operator and, therefore, greater lead time, while system faults may be repaired by the system operator alone. The difficulty in applying timely fault diagnostics is in the availability of diagnostic equipment at the point of system access. Typically portable diagnostic equipment must be used, which itself takes time to set-up and run, adding to the disruption cycle time.
It is desirable, therefore, to provide a system having both ease of access as well as built in system diagnostic equipment capable of responding to an operator in an interactive manner to enable timely fault isolation. While this capability may be added to newly designed systems it is not often practical, or even possible, to retrofit installed systems in a manner to provide both access and diagnostic capability. Even with newly designed systems, while there is the recognition of the value that designed access and built-in diagnostics provide to the system, there may be concern for the equipment configuration required to provide such access as well as concern that the added diagnostics will reduce system reliability.